Word: middlemarch
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...Middlemarch is a six-part rendering of George Eliot's monumental novel that premieres on Masterpiece Theatre this Sunday. The mini-series, which cost some $10 million to make, was a recent critical and popular success in Britain, leading to lectures and even debates on the novel. As a result of the show, a Penguin paperback of the novel topped best-seller lists for five weeks, and is still doing well. The town of Stamford in Lincolnshire, where exteriors were filmed, is preparing for a summertime influx of tourists...
...book. But can the series' success at home be duplicated here? It's hard to say. As Masterpiece Theatre host Russell Baker wryly suggests, many Americans, like himself, developed a terminal aversion to Eliot's writing after having to read Silas Marner in ninth grade. That is a shame. Middlemarch is truly among the greatest books ever written and is, as Virginia Woolf put it, "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people." Its author, whose given name was Mary Ann (later Marian) Evans, was a Victorian feminist who lived openly with a married man and pursued...
...Middlemarch was published in installments in 1871 and '72, but the action of the book, which the mini-series dutifully reflects, takes place in the troubled 1830s. Railways have begun to girdle (and befoul) England's green and pleasant land, and the Industrial Revolution has brought new wealth to towns like Eliot's fictional Middlemarch. The passage of the Reform Bill of 1832, which enlarged the franchise, has created fear of revolution among reactionaries while holding out the promise of democratizing a corrupt and elitist Parliament...
...Middlemarch is a moral tale, but one told with frequently mordant wit. At the novel's center are two altruists whose yearning to serve others is frustrated in large measure by ill-advised marriages. Dorothea Brooke (Juliet Aubrey) is ward of her eccentric uncle Arthur (Robert Hardy), who is known as "the worst landlord in the county" for the shabby way he treats his tenants. Dorothea's desire to improve the lot of others leads her to wed the Rev. Edward Casaubon (Patrick Malahide), a scholar and cleric more than twice her young age. She is enraptured by his dream...
...quotation from her paper sticks in my head. Things aren't so bad for you and me as they might have been, George Eliot wrote in Middlemarch, because of those who faithfully lived hidden lives and rest in unvisited tombs. Things aren't so bad for you and me, things aren...